


Nicotiana

by aderyn



Series: Two Hills [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Young Sherlock, secret garden, the seeds of addiction, toxic plants & cigarettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 16:01:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/420710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His mother grew a night garden full of white flowers— moonflower, jasmine, plants of the genus nicotiana, solinaceae, the nightshades—that bloomed only after dusk, flooding his olfactory center with their heady evidence.  He’d sit and smoke there sometimes, sixteen, cursed by the sporophytic tissues of each pistil...</p>
<p>He’s asleep when John slips in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nicotiana

 

His mother grew a night garden full of white flowers— moonflower, jasmine, plants of the genus _nicotiana_ , _solinaceae_ , the nightshades—that bloomed only after dusk, flooding his olfactory center with their heady evidence.  He’d sit and smoke there sometimes, sixteen, cursed by the sporophytic tissues of each pistil and the hard truths of the pea-shingle and the soft truths of the chalk beneath. He’d pace there sometimes with his pupils pinned and a tremor in his hand and the rings rising in wreaths and crowns and scarves of smoke. ( _Nicotiana tabacum,_ the flower of addiction, the night in the veins, the beginning, the beginning.)

***

Now dusk opens on the urban wild, where he spots pollens through the ocular, slaps patches on a strained forearm, tears full tilt into a dead end, pins a criminal to a wall and lifts an eye, accidental, to the morning moon.

***

He’s asleep when John slips in, catches in the lines of his face the faint fasciculations of the stimulant, sees the child who became the man who will leave if he doesn’t, if he doesn’t (keep him from the coca leaf, the poppy , tobacco pressed into the rubber tree…)

One cold hand under his, eyes tracking under thin lids. 

( _The garden blooms, broods; Sherlock, amid the cursed statuary, waiting for a brother to break the spell, for his mother to turn on a light upstairs, for the cigarette to burn down to his beloved ash, to be turned somehow, by a miracle,human_.)

It’ll take a steady hand to trim the tangled garden back.


End file.
